The sun sets. The sky blazes like a spilled rainbow, violet inkblots of clouds splashed across dazzling streaks of oranges and pinks. It’s beautiful, it really is.

But I resent it this evening. Sunday. The familiar feeling of unease grows stronger as the shadows stretch and fade. It has chased me since childhood, this feeling, and it finds me every Sunday night, as the sun sinks.

It doesn’t matter what Monday brings—school, or a job, or nothing at all—the unease is there. The discomfort. The dread.

Too easy to think, to remember, to worry and obsess. Missed opportunities, failed attempts at success, the times that fear has held me back. Ghosts of the past and of the future haunting me, laughing, wearing me down. Memories of lost friends and lost chances.

I pour myself a shot of Kentucky whiskey, not because I really want it, but because this is how it goes. The dance, the ritual. Three drinks in, the feeling will dissipate, or at least be hidden by a different feeling:

Slight blurring of the lines of the ordinary, comfort in confusion. Burning down the throat, in the stomach, warmness in the mind.

Music playing too loud, fingers clicking their way across the keyboard like mindless little tap dancers telling a story they’ll never understand.

The thoughts of tomorrow will fall to the back of my mind, and then out of it completely. Instead, there will be thoughts of zombies or of nefarious bankers, or of heart-broken lovers—whatever feels like being let out of the mind and on to a computer monitor.

And then it will be Monday, and I’ll go to bed, and I’ll wake up a few hours later, feeling a little worse than I would like, with another Sunday under my belt.